Material Layers: Editing shared Material Layer Instance causes severe editor slowdown， is this expected behavior?

Development Asset Creation
, ,
1

I’m currently working with the Material Layers system in UE5 and encountered an issue I want to confirm with the community.

Recently, I started using a single Material Layer Instance (MLI) as a shared control asset for multiple Material Instances.
The goal is to keep parameters consistent and avoid manually updating the same values across many materials.

However, I noticed a problem:

Even when the MLI is referenced by only a few materials, editing any parameter inside the MLI causes the Editor to freeze for a noticeable amount of time (1–3 seconds or longer).
This happens even when changing a simple scalar/vector parameter that should not trigger shader recompilation.

My questions are:

  1. Is this slowdown expected behavior for the Material Layers system?

  2. Has anyone found a way to reduce the Editor stalls when modifying a shared MLI?

  3. Is this a known limitation or something related to my project setup?

I’m on UE5.6, and the slowdown is consistent across multiple machines.

Any insights, confirmations, or workflow tips would be greatly appreciated.